About the Film

The Trouble with Merle looks at celebrity, memory, identity, race and class…and at why Merle Oberon’s origins mattered to people on a tiny island, in a country at the bottom of the world.

The Trouble with Merle (2002)

55 minutes

About Merle Oberon

Merle Oberon’s career was launched in London by her first husband, film producer Alexander Korda. She went on to make over 40 films in Britain and Hollywood including The Private Life of Henry VIII (with Charles Laughton), The Private Life of Don Juan (with Douglas Fairbanks), The Scarlet Pimpernel (with Leslie Howard), The Dark Angel (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress), These Three, Over the Moon, The Divorce of Lady X, The Cowboy and the Lady, Wuthering Heights (as Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff), Lydia and Berlin Express.

The Trouble with Merle

Merle Oberon was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s.

Studio publicists said she was born into a wealthy family in Hobart, Tasmania – Australia’s island state and, after her father’s death, joined her aristocratic godparents in India. Yet stories about the true origin of the exotic almond-eyed actress persisted, competing side by side with urban myths and wild speculation.

But Merle’s birthplace and her ethnic origins are only one piece of the puzzle, and the film looks at the many alternative versions of reality which have entered Tasmania’s folklore, asking why various versions of the Merle story co-exist and why the fascination with her past has been kept alive so long.